


Bring Trousers

by SpaceTimeConundrum



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: All Canon Characters Are Cameo Appearances, Gen, POV Original Character, Spoilers for Episode: s04e17-18 The End of Time, life story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 22:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3305075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceTimeConundrum/pseuds/SpaceTimeConundrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three hundred and fifty years is a long time to not know who you truly are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Trousers

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for a fan fiction contest in 2013, held by the lovely [Lydia Butz](http://lydiabutz.tumblr.com). Contestants were provided with a drawing of a Time Lady character with years for each of her regenerations and told to write a backstory for her, presuming that she'd spent her entire life on Earth without a TARDIS.
> 
> This is what I came up with and I'm very proud to say it won [First Prize](http://lydiabutz.tumblr.com/post/51562020180/winners). I've edited it ever so slightly to fix a few typos. My thanks again to Lydia, for this wonderful idea, the clever title, and the excellent Doctor Who fan art which is now decorating my living room.

**The list of people she’d trusted with her secret over the years was not a long one.**

That was not particularly surprising though, since it really wasn’t the sort of thing you brought up in polite company. Usually her biggest problem was the incredibly slow aging, not the fact that instead of dying like any normal person would, she simply changed bodies, bursting into golden flames like a phoenix and reemerging a wholly different person, complete with altered tastes and personality quirks. That was also a problem, just, less frequent. Over the course of three and a half centuries, it had only happened five times.

The first time it had happened had been quite a shock to everyone involved. She’d scarcely seen her eighteenth birthday pass when that fateful day arrived. One of the horses had thrown a shoe and she was helping her brother by calming the animal while he worked to replace it. Simple misfortune and perhaps a dash of her own foolishness led to her first death. Her foot slipped on the muddy ground, putting her in harm’s way at exactly the wrong time.

The nature of this fatal blow meant she’d actually been unconscious for most of it. Everything she knew about the Change on that first occasion had to be pieced together from what little her frightened brother would say of what he’d witnessed. She was shunned by her family as a changeling and creature of evil and had fled the village in confusion and torment just ahead of the angry mob.

Her new body was fair haired, beautiful and cunning. Heartbroken from her family’s rejection, she resolved to find happiness in spite of them. Chance and circumstance led her to Court where her keen mind and quick wit were appreciated. That was how she’d met Georges and fallen in love for the first time. They were married and, for a time, very happy.

He was the first to learn her secret, or at least some of it. He knew that her high born background was a work of fiction and about her malformed heart with its curious double beat. When they tried to have a family together and failed, after several miscarriages and two still births, he loved her still. Time betrayed her in the end though. She watched as her beloved husband aged as her own reflection in the glass remained largely unchanged over the years. Georges said he didn’t mind, what man would complain of a perpetually young and beautiful wife? But she could feel the questions and rumours beginning to swirl around her and retreated from society.

She spent most of her time in their library at the country estate, reading anything she could, hoping desperately that the next book might hold the answers she sought. None of the medical texts were illuminating and regrettably, neither did any of the religious or philosophical works provide a satisfying explanation. She did not believe herself to be a creature of myths and legends nor an instrument of darkness.

Georges passed away in 1738, leaving her a wealthy widow, but lonely without her beloved companion of more than forty years and the only person who’d ever accepted her without question. Unable to bear the sadness of living there without him, she sold the estate and moved to Paris to reinvent herself yet again.

Wishing to avoid the intense scrutiny that life at Court had involved, she attempted to lie low for a decade or so but gradually found herself drawn into salons and the bourgeoisie world of political discourse. Having lived both as a peasant and as a de facto member of the nobility, ideals of equality and liberty appealed to her.

It was during this period that she began to understand another of the mysterious gifts that it seemed only she possessed. She’d always been strangely good at guessing the paths that others’ lives might take, instinctively sensing the possibilities stretching before them like currents in a river. As France moved towards revolution she began to pay closer attention to these feelings, finding that more and more of the lives around her were heading towards violent ends. Never before had she felt so certain that the future held tragedy and turmoil. Grimly, she watched as her predictions came true and tried, too late, to temper her involvement in it all.

She’d become far too entangled though, and so she was among the women who marched on Versailles in 1789, believing that if the conflict could not be avoided, at least she might work within it to shape the outcome. For a while, she allowed herself to think that it might work after all, but it was not to be. Following her instincts, she fled Paris ahead of the Reign of Terror and the specter of the guillotine.

Her second Change in 1802 came as a brutal surprise, both to herself and the foolish Napoleonic soldier who delivered it. This time, she was aware as it happened, and oh, how it burned. After one hundred and twenty years with the same face, she’d grown comfortable with who she was, despite the fact that exactly _what_ she was remained a mystery. The experience was doubly alarming when she discovered just how drastically she’d changed this time. How far removed had she become from that peasant girl, working in her father’s orchards?

Deciding to take this as a sign and sensing nothing but further upheaval for France in the coming years, she left the land of her birth for London, England. Her new body was stubborn and had little respect for the expectations of society. She was educated, spoke four languages fluently, had money enough to support herself and no time for the racism and sexism of the day. She had lived longer than any of them, buried two children and a husband, marched in the Revolution for women’s equality, and could feel the currents of fate flow around her.

She befriended the inventors and radicals she met and took up a passionate dedication to scientific discovery. She was an intellectual product of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was well upon them; there was so much to learn and discover about the changing world around her. She maintained a laboratory in the heart of London and collaborated with anyone who would work with her. It amazed her how much a bit of money made people turn a blind eye to her eccentricities, but she was mostly tolerated, not truly accepted. It was frustratingly difficult for her to publish anything under her own name. It irritated her to be excluded simply because of her sex or the colour of her skin but she could feel in the pull of time around her that the arc of history would be on her side eventually.

She took a string of lovers; caring for each in turn, but never allowing them to get too close. The memory of the pain that losing Georges had caused still ached. Despite her emotional distance, it was in London where she met her second confidante. Rachel was young and curious and desperate to prove herself; the perfect apprentice. The two became very close over the years and one rainy night over a couple bottles of wine, she found herself telling her the whole story. Rachel was the first she’d trusted with the tale of how she Changed. She wasn’t entirely certain that her friend believed her, but it was enough that she claimed to.

She was very glad indeed that she’d had the foresight to warn Rachel ahead of time when Torchwood found her in 1899. The organization was in its infancy and cutting its teeth by swiftly and summarily dealing with potential alien threats to the Crown in the only way it knew how. She had not been so careful in this body as the last, not bothering to offer much in the way of obfuscation regarding her perpetual youth beyond vague claims that she was older than she looked or that the questioner must be confusing her with her mother. Whispers of her seeming immortality reached the wrong ears and Torchwood sent two agents out to put that to the test.

Being shot had hurt less than she’d expected, but that was probably down to shock more than anything. Luckily for her, the force of her Change disabled her attackers long enough for her to make a hasty escape down an alley. Dazed, scared and unsure if it was safe for her to return to her laboratory, she sought out Rachel’s help. It had taken some talking to convince her friend that yes, she really was the same person, but eventually she believed her. Rachel hid her when the Torchwood agents came looking and lent her some clothes. Together, they decided it would be best if she left London for a while. She booked passage to America the next day.

Her fourth body was quieter than the last, and the knowledge that there were people hunting her because of what she was made her wary of attention. She moved to New York to hide in the sea of immigrants there and try her hand at writing fiction. She’d seen so much in her two centuries of life, it felt like the right time to commit some of that experience to paper.

She sold enough to stay afloat and drifted in and out of the city’s cultural circles, meeting many young writers who would subsequently go on to greatness and many who would not. She spent her days pecking away at her typewriter next to an open window looking down on the crowded city streets and her evenings drinking coffee and discussing politics in cafes.

She read the news from Europe with distress as once again, time seemed to twist inevitably towards war, her twin hearts aching as she heard of the battlefields in her native France, unable to fully share her distress with those around her. She and Rachel had maintained written correspondence over the years, but she felt it necessary for her self-preservation to remain circumspect in her letters regarding certain aspects of her life. It didn’t help that the war slowed the progress of the international post considerably.

To distract herself from things she could not change, she began seeing Richard. He was older, in his early forties, not that she minded, since in reality she was a century and a half his senior, and lonely after the loss of his wife to cancer five years previously. They’d met at a party at someone’s loft in the city and bonded over a mutual love of literature. When he asked her to marry him and move to a small cottage upstate, no one was more surprised than she was when she said yes.

She told him that she had a rare heart defect that made it unlikely that they would ever have children together, not telling him her whole story, wary still of the consequences of discovery. She loved him, but resolved that if something happened to her, she would let him think she’d died rather than face exposure and rejection or place him in danger. Despite her fears, Eleanor was born in 1922 and miraculously, survived. Thanks to the improvements in medicine in part made during the war, they were able to operate on her heart and repair it when she was just one week old.

Her daughter was a joy and despite her frightening and tense-making entry into the world, grew to be a healthy and happy child. She had never imagined, after all these years, that such a thing would be possible for her. Richard was delighted and doted on Eleanor at every opportunity.

Her writing continued, albeit at a reduced pace while she raised her daughter, but she did her best to maintain her ties with old friends by hosting parties regularly and soaking in their tales of life in the big city. She was overjoyed to see the shifting fashions each time they visited and did her best to emulate them in the country. The world was changing again and she was outside it observing once more.

Then the Depression arrived and things changed again. Richard had lost a great deal of money when the stock market crashed; they had to sell the cottage and move to a tiny house closer to the city to make ends meet. She did her best to sell stories to magazines to bring in extra funds. They managed, but just barely and she found herself telling their daughter more and more stories from her past lives, in part to remind herself that this too would pass.

She worried for her daughter’s future but had discovered that the closer a person’s life path was tied to her own, the less distinctly she could see the possibilities ahead of them, for her own path was largely invisible to her. Probably for her own protection, she assumed.

Eleanor was eighteen when the accident happened. They’d had nothing but freezing rain for a week and the roads were icy. She’d seen the car coming, in time to push Eleanor out of the way, but not soon enough to save herself. As she lay on the frozen ground, looking up at her daughter’s sobbing face, she could feel the Change coming again, too soon this time. It wasn’t fair! She’d finally gotten the family she’d always wanted. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen!

Desperately, she told her daughter to get back, to take the driver back into town to get help, leave her there. Eleanor refused to leave her side until she hissed at her through gritted teeth, “Eleanor Mae, I love you, but you do as you’re told. You get that man out of here, he can’t see this. Take care of your father and DON’T LOOK FOR ME.”

She must’ve been starting to glow at that point because Eleanor jerked back in fear, obeying her mother’s dying command and dragging the shocked driver into his dented automobile, taking the wheel herself.

She held back the Change until the car had driven away. In the car’s mirror, Eleanor watched as a fountain of orange flames lit up the trees behind them where her mother had just been. When they returned to the scene, nothing remained of her mother’s body, just a few scorch marks and melted frost where she’d lain. A month later she received a letter, postmarked from New York City. It read, “I love you,” then listed the address of a bank safety deposit box with the cryptic instruction, “in case it ever happens to you.” A small key fell out of the envelope and onto the desk where she'd opened it.

Her fifth body was probably her shortest to date and rather unfortunately timed, given current political climate. She’d certainly dealt with racism before, but the last time, she’d had the benefit of wealth to insulate herself against it. This time she headed for familiar ground, hiding in artistic communities and discovering that this body had an affinity for painting. After the war, she moved west, making a new home for herself in San Francisco.

She worked as a painter at first and then moved on to photography. She traveled the world as the decades passed and air transportation became more accessible to the general public, taking on contracts as a photo journalist to support her wanderlust. Her gift with languages came in handy and she added a few more to her repertoire during her adventures. Each time she returned to the city after a long absence, she reinvented herself; new identity, new clothes to cover her tracks. She planned ahead properly this time, setting up the basics for herself and plenty of money squirreled away. She wasn’t going to let the Change catch her unprepared again.

Over the years she did her best to keep track of her daughter’s whereabouts and sent small souvenirs or unsigned post cards when she could. As near as she could tell, her daughter had not inherited her curse. She was delighted when she learned that Eleanor had married and successfully started her own family. Richard passed away in 1956; she sent flowers but didn’t attend the funeral. It would’ve been too difficult to explain her presence.

She made a bit of a name for herself photographing Vietnam War protesters and the rise of counter culture, but did her best to avoid putting a face to that name too often. It would have been something else had she had a camera available to her for her whole life. Imagine the retrospective show she’d have been able to put on then!

She celebrated her three hundredth birthday in Paris, 1963. Was in Los Angeles when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, West Germany the day the Wall came down. Back in San Francisco on December 31st 1999 to watch the turn of another century; there was a strange feeling in the air then, something in the timelines that she couldn’t quite grasp.

She just happened to be in London in 2006 when the alien ship crashed into Big Ben. Everyone around her was panicking, but she just stood there, thinking, and nearly ran into a man in a heavy leather jacket when she turned to walk back to her hotel. That strange feeling was back, stronger that time. Later, when she watched the news feeds from Downing Street, one of the alien experts brought in to deal with the crisis waved to the cameras and she blinked because he seemed terribly familiar. The incident was later written off as an elaborate hoax to gain control of Britain's nuclear launch codes, but she wasn’t quite so sure.

Something was happening, and she couldn’t help but feel it would involve her somehow. It felt tantalizingly like the answers she’d been seeking all of her long life were just out of her reach, but she could find them if she tried.

At Christmas, the Sycorax came and one third of the planet’s population were held hostage until their ship was shot down over London. Torchwood at work again. It made her shudder. The next spring brought the ghosts that became metal monsters, but they soon disappeared and everyone seemed to forget about them afterwards. London evidently had a target painted on it, since the next holiday season brought a deadly web-star ship that somehow drained the Thames.

In 2008, an entire hospital was transported to the moon and back, the American President was killed by a madman claiming to have made contact with an alien species shortly after getting himself elected Prime Minister, the “Prisoner Zero” incident took over all of the airwaves around the world for half an hour and then vanished, and a spacefaring replica of the Titanic nearly flattened Buckingham Palace. The next year was even worse. A new miracle weight loss plan in the UK was revealed as an alien breeding program, then the amazing pollution-eliminating ATMOS system turned out to be an alien plot to choke the planet (and then convert it for breeding, _naturally_ ), followed a few months later by the abrupt relocation of the entire planet and massive Dalek invasion. She’d actually yet to hear a satisfactory explanation for how that one was thwarted; the authorities were still being rather vague about it, but she’d heard that UNIT might have been involved.

Christmas 2009 was the turning point for her though. Right in the middle of the President’s big speech about the economy, everyone on the planet turned into a duplicate of the same eerily familiar man with bleached-blond hair. Well, almost everyone. She didn’t. She was fortunate enough to have been home alone when it happened, otherwise she dreaded to think what they might have done with her. That shook her to her core.

She’d known for a very long time that she wasn’t like other people, but that was the first time she’d seriously dealt with the idea that she might not even be _human_. It was one thing to consider the _possibility_ , another entirely to be confronted with irrefutable evidence. She spent several hours huddled in her apartment, worrying and trying to decide what, if anything, she could do. Then that huge red planet materialized next to the Earth and her head was filled with the agony of millions of voices crying out in pain. She didn’t even realize that everyone had been returned to their normal selves until the mysterious planet disappeared and she could think clearly again. The incident was swept under the rug as a “mass delusion” publicly, but there’d been nothing wrong with her memories, to say nothing of all the CCTV footage that proved it had actually happened.

Nearly three hundred and fifty years old, she decided it was about time she found out once and for all what she really was. And after that incident, she was almost certain that the answer to that question was related to the identity of that red planet. Maybe it was time she went back to London since that seemed to be where all the action was.

It was there, posing as a student, that she met Liam. Like her, he was seeking answers following an encounter with a man whom he said called himself the Doctor and disappeared in a blue box before his eyes. At first, she was skeptical that this Doctor even existed, but when she looked into it, a surprising number of the alien incidents included reports from eyewitnesses that mention a blue box or a mystery man calling himself the Doctor. Including, now that she recalled it, the British Prime Minister publicly pleading for a Doctor’s help on television during the Sycorax invasion. Not surprisingly, Torchwood had been looking for him as well, but their organisation was mostly destroyed during the battle of Canary Wharf, she was relieved to learn.

Liam met someone that used to belong to an organization called LINDA, dedicated to locating the mysterious Doctor. Most of their information seemed out of date, but one thing jumped out at her as she read their file on the Doctor. _He is believed to be an alien, who has been around for hundreds of years and has the ability to change his face._ She practically stopped breathing when she read this, prompting Liam to badger her until she reluctantly gave him an abbreviated version of the truth. He was eager for her to give him a demonstration until she explained that the process was permanent, painful, and unpredictable. She promised him that in the event that it happens to her again, he will be the first person she calls.

Against her better judgment, when indeed, the inevitable occurs just two years later, it is Liam to whom she sends a desperate text to pick her up. She’d been riding her bicycle home late from class, having embraced the notion of obtaining a twenty-first century university education as more than just something to do while waiting for the Doctor to appear, when it happened. A London taxicab of all things.

There were witnesses this time, of course, but not as many as there might have been had it been earlier in the day. The energy released from this Change is powerful enough to blow the CCTV cameras in a two block radius. It also managed to light an unsuspecting shrubbery on fire, providing a convenient distraction for a hasty, stumbled retreat.

She squints at the tiny screen on her phone, confused as to why she has to hold it so close to her face to read the text. Side effect of the change or will this new body need glasses? Head’s still too fuzzy to be sure. The shirt she’d been wearing is torn and covered in blood; the skirt’s more or less intact but looks wrong somehow. Everything’s too tight, definitely taller this time. Something feels different; time for personal inventory.

Legs, check. Hands, check. Hair, short and fluffy. Skin, pale and freckled. Face, strangely stubbly, wait, _what_? No reflective surfaces present themselves for use as a mirror. Oh. Right. Camera phone.

He nearly drops the phone when his new, decidedly male face appears on the screen. Can that even happen? A quick pat down of other critical areas of anatomy confirms that yes, apparently it can, and had. One more mystery to ask the Doctor about, if and when he ever reappears.

"Oh, he’s never gonna let me hear the end of this," he mutters in a new, oddly lower voice. He’s picked up a London accent this time too, after a century as an American, _brilliant_.

He adds a quick addendum to his text to Liam. “Bring trousers.”


End file.
